Dark matter versus pulsars: Catching the impostor

Abstract

Evidence of excess GeV emission nearly coinciding with the Galactic Centre has been interpreted as a possible signature of annihilating dark matter. In this paper, we argue that it seems too early to discard pulsars as a viable explanation for the observed excess. On the heels of the recently released Second Fermi LAT Pulsar Catalogue (2FPC), it is still possible that a population of hard (Γ<1) millisecond pulsars (MSPs) either endemic to the innermost region or part of a larger nascent collection of hard MSPs that appears to be emerging in the 2FPC could explain the GeV excess near theGalactic Centre. © 2013 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.